Information highways, despite the hype, are no more than a combination of telephone, video and computers, as are the gadgets telecom engineers devise for the future. They are all really just cell phones plugged into the internet, linking with fixed stations, videophones, virtual reality devices, computers, modems, data banks, tradesmen, managers, repairmen. All are logged in to technical, social or professional networks.

There are no black holes, no negatives, no opposites in this joined-up world. Everything runs smoothly in electronic silence. Even the occasional audible signal can be turned off. Communication is easy when all it involves is using machines to connect with machines. If you want to stop communicating, to enjoy your own company, all you have to do is put down the handset and switch off the screen.

Anyone using such machines is free and happy in a world of instant communication, without time to think ill of himself or of anyone else. The long term doesn’t exist in this world, only short-term gains. The communications industry dreams of productivity, utility and management, the watchwords of homo communicans.

Homo communicans is inseparable from his communication devices. They are his life and he takes on their characteristics. He is their servant as much as their master, but he is unaware of his chains because he believes himself to be in control and as powerful as the machines. They make his life easy. Everything is positive, everything in its place. There is no price to pay and no other side of the coin in what Douglas Coupland, in his novel Microserfs (1), calls the “flatland of cyberculture”. Cyberculture uses the language of clans and communities but it does not share their reality, for to join the clan, you have to make sacrifices. And in cyber flatland the only thing to fear is the loss of the machines: breakdown.

When I asked Martin Landau, an eminent researcher in organisation science at (...)